I've managed to convince myself somewhat that I've achieved something while recently working /joining my new company.
It's has not been easy to do that. Leading up to this point, nothing really that I've been asked to do or have done has quite filled my lingering expectations.
However it now has by finally being able to Authenticate with our Web Api. This has finally convinced me that I've achieved something. Sure, I've achieved other things within the last 3 weeks but I guess it's because I thought that doing this specifically would be ever so useful. Everything else was secondary. Everything else is just something to do. This was something I wanted to do.
And come to think about it, that's mostly always the best way to do things.
Basically, I've got an AngularJS5 application, calling out to Okta(an identity provider) and receiving a token which represents having logged in and authenticated successfully(at the identity provider). With this token, I've injecting it into the Http headers of all my future http requests.
This is all because I want to call our Web API providing this token(which it validates and now accepts) and processing the response from the API in return. The response would be some data that I had requested. Prior to this, any calls I made resulted a http 401, access denied error.
I'm using A URL Interceptor in Angular to do the token injecting to my outgoing requests. It's actually pretty cool.
Where I'm ultimately going with this is to write a Excel plugin for Office 2016 which now supports Add-ins written in JavaScript. I've never been a fan of JavaScript but I'm slowly going to the dark side and I'm embracing TypeScript with wide arms.
There are some pain points however in creating an Add-in like this:
- You must use SSL otherwise Excel will not load your add-in. This requires running a locally SSLified web server.
- Excel requires that you call a function called Office.Initialize() to start your application which prevents you from troubleshooting in the browser (as the browser will never call this) but disable this call allows this...but then you can't load the add-in in Excel. Doh!
- When you're running the add-in in Excel, you have no F-12 debugger. You can however attach a debugger via Visual Studio to see all your console.log() messages!
- Excel needs you to load Office.js which messes with your URLs so you have to use Angular's UseHash:true routing strategy. The downside with this is the identity provider provides login token via a redirect query parameter which gets frazzled somehow because it contains a hash itself. So I'm fighting Office.js' useHash requirement and a way to circumvent the redirect nature of the identity provider. I've implemented a solution which doesn't require a redirect but can't test it because of the next problem...
- Excel prevents cross domain requests and returns access denied when I try to send data to the identity provider.
So its really the last issue which is preventing all my work, er, from working under excel. It all works outside of excel.
I'm half way there and this is a conciliation which still represents successfully authenticating with both the identity provider and then the Web API from my web app. That I'm happy with.
Up to and including this point, my weeks have been fairly densely packed with assimilation of code, theory, design and architecture. Its hasn't been productive in the sense that I've felt useful though. It's like studying to be a doctor but never being able to treat patients. That's why this little achievement is a good thing for me.
These weeks have been fairly immersive, so much so I think the longer that I thought about something the quicker I got confused: There was a lot of disparate things that I could not connect together. I think this phenomenon is the unrequited yearning for completeness.
Some of the earlier days, I'd just plunge into the abyss of uncertainty and explore the murky depths for what seemed like hours before coming up to breath without much to show for it - but I'd seen a lot. Starting out is like being an explorer, you just have to explore.
Exploring can be quite frustrating, especially if your looking for something you can't find, or searching, as in my case, for an unquenchable understanding of everything you find - something that frustratingly requires more than expedition. If you don't take your note book with you, then you'll be back yet again.
Hopefully now the light is beginning to shine though, daylight is beginning to emerge.